Airmiles and Pulp Science
Lots of time on airplanes this past week. I have been a loyal UAL passengerfor years,but I’vechosen to fly AAL increasingly for the past six months. I think it’s about time to switch from Red Carpet Club to Admiral’s Club. To me, it is obvious why UAL is struggling. UAL keeps trying to cut costs, at the expense of customer service and comfort. AAL has in the meantimeadded more room in all of their seats and put laptop power adapters throughout the planes. Crushed kneecaps, vacant customer service desks,and dead batteries are just not worth the trouble. Besides, with the acquisition of TWA, AAL seems to have adopted the TWA habit of getting to most destinations significantly ahead of schedule.
Interesting that all of the major media outlets today seem to be carrying the exact same set of “scientific discovery” headlines today, emphasizing the same inaccurate points. First is the “people are shockingly similar to mice!” story. The actual “story” is that the mouse genome is nearly complete and will be published soon. The fact that mice and humans are both mammals(a zoological classification based on genetic similarity)is not news. The fact that mammals share a large number of genes is a surprise to nobody, and certainly was not discovered in the past few weeks.
The second pulp science story is that “extra-marital affairs cause heart-attacks.” Of course, newspapers love to deliberately conflate correlation with causation, and blissfully ignore the possibility of potential external causal factors that may explain the correlation (for example, people who have sex more frequently are statistically more likely to die from it, and by nature are more likely to have multiple partners — or perhaps people that engage in extramarital affairs are also more likely to engage in particular cardio-stressing activities like excessive drinking). Perhaps the BBC’s simplifications are part of the journalists mantra to “write for the eight-grade level.”